'Dare the boist'rous main': the role of the Belfast Newsletter in the process of emigration from Ulster to North America 1760-1800

Before the mass migrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century, earlier waves of migration in the eighteenth century saw significant numbers of people leave Ireland, predominantly from Ulster, to settle in North America. This article, using as its principal data source the Belfast News Letter ( BNL), its letters, advertisements and reports, focuses firstly on reconstructing the late eighteenth-century migration process and voyage, highlighting the barriers represented by the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the challenges of the sea, there were problems with the ships, the ever-present danger of disease and also threats from other vessels, from privateers to press gangs. The voyage was recognized as a ‘universal dread’, and the risks taken to ‘dare the boist’rous main’ were perhaps not minimized in the pages of the BNL, whose editorial stance was antipathetic to the migration for the potential harm it caused to Ulster by removing so many of its industrious young. The second part of this article goes on to consider the newspaper’s and others’ vested interests in the emigration process, demonstrates how these were manifested in the press and sets the coverage of this very significant early emigration flow within the context of contemporary religious and colonial discourses at a period of very lively transatlantic interactions.

Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham

Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham (2010) (back cover)

Dana Sutton, University of California:
‘The great merit of Estelle Haan's study is that she is willing to take Dillingham seriously as a poet. Her reproduction of his work, together with an English translation and very detailed studies of his individual poems have the combined effect of rescuing an interesting poet from near-total oblivion. This, in my opinion, is the finest thing a neo-Latin scholar can do, and Haan accomplishes her task with the same skill, sensitivity, and eloquence that have distinguished her studies of other neo-Latin poets of this period (Joseph Addison and Vincent Bourne). It is impossible not to react to this volume with extreme respect and appreciation’.

Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester:
‘Nothing substantial has ever been published on Dillingham, but with this volume we have a new corpus of poetry that intersects with the work of many other seventeenth-century neo-Latin and vernacular poets. Professor Haan’s scholarship is here (as always) placed at the service of the poet, and she leads the reader gently through the work of a new poet. Professor Haan is the most eminent and able neo-Latinist of her generation, and her scholarship never fails; sometimes it dazzles as in the chapters on the hangman's stone and on Renaissance topiary. Her research is always up-to-date, and her translations have a gracefulness that other laborers in the vineyard can only envy’.

Alien gosd in the new epics: Noah remythologised through the ancient astronaut hypothesis in Abel's Montagut's "La gesta d'Utnoa"

Modern scientific world-view has undermined traditional myths, the functional survival of which seems to depend today in the West on a positivist justification. This would place them in the field of real History, through their study and revitalization by pseudoscientific disciplines such as the Atlantis and the ancient astronaut hypotheses. These have inspired new epic poems in (regular) verse that combine classic and/or biblical myths with a (pseudo)scientific modern world-view. For example, the critical rewriting of Noah’s myth by using the ancient astronaut hypothesis as a fictional device to produce a contemporary kind of plausibility allowed Abel Montagut to renew epic poetry, updating it also by adopting science fiction chronotopes in order to structure his fictional construction and to generate a high ethical sense for our time. Thus, his Poemo de Utnoa (1993) / La gesta d’Utnoa (1996), which has become a major classic of the literature in Esperanto thanks to its original version in this language, is a landmark of both science fiction and neo-biblical epics. This poem is written from a secular and purely literary perspective.

William Herschel Telescope observations of distant comets

We present results from broad-band V- and R-filter observations obtained at the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope on La Palma on 2002 July 12-14. A total of six comets were imaged, and their heliocentric distances ranged from 2.8 to 6.1 au. The comets observed were 43P/Wolf-Harrington, 129P/Shoemaker-Levy 3, 133P/Elst-Pizarro, 143P/Kowal-Mrkos, P/1998 U4 (Spahr) and P/2001 H5 (NEAT). A detailed surface brightness profile analysis indicates that three of the targeted comets (43P/Wolf-Harrington, 129P/Shoemaker-Levy 3 and P/1998 U4) were visibly active, and the remaining three comets were stellar in appearance. Further analysis shows that for the three `stellar-like' comets the possible coma contribution to the observed flux does not exceed 12.2 per cent, and in the case of comet 143P/Kowal-Mrkos the coma contribution is expected to be as low as 1 per cent, and so the resulting photometry most likely represents that of the projected nucleus surface. Effective radii for the inactive comets range from 1.02 to 4.56 km, and the effective radius upper limits for the active comets range from 1.94 to 4.15 km. We assume an albedo and phase coefficient of 0.04 and 0.035 mag deg-1, respectively, with the exception of comets 133P/Elst-Pizarro and 143P/Kowal-Mrkos for which phase coefficients were previously measured. These values are compared with previous measurements, and for comet 43P/Wolf-Harrington we find that the nucleus axial ratio a/b could be as large as 2.44. For the active comets we measured dust production levels in terms of the Af? quantity. Spectral gradients were extracted for two of the inactive comets from their measured broad-band colour indices, and compared with the rest of the comet population for which (V-R) colour and spectral gradient values exist. We find a spectral gradient for 143P/Kowal-Mrkos of 9.9 +/- 8.1 per cent/100 nm, which is very typical of Jupiter-family comets, the majority of which have reflectivity gradients in the range 0-13 per cent (100 nm)-1. The spectral gradient for comet 133P/Elst-Pizarro is amongst the bluest yet measured. We measure a (V-R) colour index value of 0.14 +/- 0.11 for the nucleus of 133P/Elst-Pizarro which is considerably lower than previous measurements. A possible explanation for this difference is considered.